


There are Worse Things

by A_Writing_Pen



Category: Rurouni Kenshin
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-17
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-02-05 00:29:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1798876
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Writing_Pen/pseuds/A_Writing_Pen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shinta leaves his village for the first and final time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There are Worse Things

**Author's Note:**

> Day 3 | June 17: Beginnings or Farewells

Day 3 | June 17: Beginnings or Farewells

Obasan was taking Shinta to meet the traders today. He had only lived with her for a month, since his family passed away. Most of the other villagers had passed away as well, leaving more in the ground than their homes and farms. But he tried not to think about this just as he had tried not to think about how Obasan had grown thinner and paler since she had first taken him in.

Obasan had told him about the traders the night before. He would go with the traders without crying, do whatever they told him, and going with the traders, no matter how “bad” it seemed, was better than remaining in a dead village. Shinta did not understand what would be “bad” about living with the traders or why he should think that life with the traders would be that way, but the way she averted his eyes when she said it told him he shouldn’t ask.

What he did not know was that the traders were actually slavers, and that he was the object of trade. He would come to know this over the year he would spend with them, the same way he had come to learn what “illness” and “death” were; words that came from adults, but veiled the real thing that was unspoken, like how he couldn’t quite describe the difference between the people he knew and the bodies they left behind. For him, “death” could not cover the sameness of bodies once they were put in the earth. Though the faces and bodies themselves were different, once the cholera took its course, the stillness and glazed eyes made them all the same. He had no word for the uniformity of bodies that needed burial.

For now he walked quietly and obediently. He brimmed with questions but he knew that adults did not like to be asked questions. Like when he wanted to ask why his brother had to be put into the ground once he stopped vomiting and uncontrollably shaking his small frame to the point where he seem to want to tear to pieces. Then he wanted to ask if mother would go with him when she was also vomiting and shaking, and when she and his father did, there was no one left to ask if he would soon die too.

They were approaching the farthest outpost of the village, marked by a single wooden post. They had arrived early before the traders, leaving Shinta to think more on the questions that he still had and if it was worth speaking them. It was futile to ask more details about the traders. He tried his best to ask as indirectly as a seven year old was capable of before the left, but she either didn’t answer or redirected the answer. It wasn’t until he finally saw two men in travel gear coming from the far side of the road that the question popped into his head.

“Will they miss me?”

The woman held onto her neutral sternness that was shaped by long years of poverty and loss. The rigidness of her face was not lessened by the wrinkles of age, and the young boy could not read any surprise or contemplation in it. What he meant to say was would Obasan and her little thin dog miss him, because they were the only ones left in the ruined village. But he had used “they” when there was no “they” left. The fact everyone he had known was dead was still something he had to get used to, as he hadn’t yet come up with a way to change his language to reflect it.

“It’s time to go.” She said.

And that was his only send off before leaving the village behind for good.


End file.
